The fickle critic

Personally, I have trouble using the "I liked it" scale ala Netflix. A movie that garners 5 stars one week only finds 4 another week. In a way, this arises from ambiguity present even within the "I liked it" scale. Did I like it because I was in the mood for a happy film? Or it an enjoyable serious film? Would I like to see it again?

You will probably point out that Garden State, Click, and Finding Neverland were all blockbuster movies. I'm not saying they were bad. I just want to make a statement about how I relate to them. Again, ratings have multiple interpretations, which is a perennial frustration of mine.

I find that the media collection on my computer is mostly songs I like, since I’ll delete anything that I don’t like. This means that I have the option of rating things on a 2 point scale (giving each song a score of 4 or 5) or I can normalize my rating system. One star would be "good", three might be "very good", while five would be "fantastically good". I tend to use the 4 star/5 star system, since I hate giving songs like "Eye of the Tiger" 2 stars 🙂

I ran into the same issue with my movie ratings. In part, that’s why I developed my personal scale. I found myself perfectly satisfied with movies like Braveheart and wanted to give them high marks for being "good" and "entertaining". But ultimately I had to force myself to normalize my ratings by establishing a standard. I wish there was a guilt-free way to rate things we like.

For music, maybe you can view it as a scale of how frequently you want the song to play. Thus giving a song a frequency of "2" doesn’t sound as bad as "2 stars".

I interpret public polling ratings (and most professional reviewers) like this: 4 or 5 stars indicates lots of interest, but is too coarse to filter quality, 1 or 2 stars indicates disdain, but many things utterly lacking in merit do not earn public disdain.

I especially liked the rating system used by the Whole Earth folks: three separate dimensions for Style, Content, and Consequence, each rated on a five point iconographic scale of Stinker (picture holding nose), Thumbs-Down, Shrug, Thumbs-Up, and Hats Off!

This influenced how I generally rate things myself: Something has to be extraordinary in multiple dimensions to be flagged with 5 stars.